[kde-edu]: ANN: First major release of Eclectus

[Christoph Burgmer]

First major release of Eclectus, a dictionary for Han characters

I would like to announce the release of Eclectus 0.2beta, which is the first 
major release so far. Eclectus is a dictionary for Chinese character (Han 
character, Hanzi, Kanji) based languages like Mandarin Chinese or Japanese.

Chinese characters pose special demands on learners not found in alphabetic 
languages. Chinese for example needs the learner to acquire more than 3000 
characters to become fluent in reading, and the writing system itself only 
provides marginal hints on the pronunciation of words. The evolution of 
Chinese characters has produced a multitude of interconnections between 
glyphs, and an analysis of radical and phonetic elements has proven essential 
for teaching and learning characters. Eclectus wants to address these 
challenges.

Eclectus provides several features not found in traditional paper-based or 
electronic dictionaries:
  - Look-up on mouse selection,
  - Forgiving search and hints to graphically similar characters,
  - Quick-access radical table,
  - Component based search (aka multi-radical),
  - Handwriting recognition,
  - Stroke order information,
  - Audio, and
  - Character component trees.

Eclectus runs on KDE4 (using PyKDE) and depends on the relatively new cjklib 
and is available under the GPL. It supports the major dictionaries CEDICT, 
EDICT, and HanDeDict. More features are given in the project's wiki [1]. For 
screenshots and a screencast see [2].

Packages are readily available for Debian and RPM-based distributions [3]. 
Ubuntu packages can be installed from the personal package archive at [4]. 
There is a short page on how to install under [5].

Eclectus is still in beta phase. The program has some rough edges, but users 
are encouraged to give it a try and report back issues. Many tasks are still 
on the TODO list, and developers are welcome to join the project. One major 
task will be porting to pure Qt, so that in future versions support for MS 
Windows and Mac OS can be offered.

I'll be happy about any constructive feedback

-Christoph Burgmer

[1] http://code.google.com/p/eclectus/wiki/About
[2] http://code.google.com/p/eclectus/wiki/Screenshots
[3] http://code.google.com/p/eclectus/downloads/list
[4] https://launchpad.net/~cburgmer/+archive/ppa
[5] http://code.google.com/p/eclectus/wiki/Install